During a live press conference on Tuesday, Argentine President Cristina Fernández thanked “the Peruvian government and population” for their decision to leave without effect the scheduled, but controversial, visit of a British frigate “in support of the Argentine sovereignty claim over the Malvinas Islands.”
The next Mercosur presidential summit is scheduled to take place next 26/28 June in the city of Mendoza, when the rotating chair will be handed for the following six months to Brazil.
Adding fuel to the quarrel between Argentina and Spain for disagreements over Spanish investors administrated YPF, Spanish Industry minister of José Manuel Soria vowed on Tuesday to defend his country’s interests.
Thirty years after the end of the South Atlantic conflict, the people of the Falkland Islands will be recovering an iconic leisure ground which remained banned for three decades because of the mines planted by the retreating Argentine forces that invaded the Islands 2 April 1982.
Uruguayan president Jose Mujica promised on Monday to ‘fight to the death’ for the future of Mercosur in spite of the fact that the group’s junior members Uruguay and Paraguay are suffering the most as Argentina and Brazil implement growing hurdles to trade.
“As of this year Brazil will follow the US example giving a 25% margin of preference to local goods in government procurement”, said Fernando Pimentel, Minister for Development, Industry and Foreign Trade.
Argentina’s truckers called Monday an indefinite strike to demand higher pay rates, parking their rigs in protest just as exporters were counting on them to haul freshly harvested soybeans to port.
According to press reports from Norway and New Zealand over the weekend, the 54-foot yacht steel yacht Nilaya is reported to be sailing off Antarctica with a broken boom and is heading for an unspecified Argentine Antarctic base to carry out emergency repairs and to refuel.
“You were right, or at least that is what Argentines I come across in the street tell me”, said former Uruguayan president Jorge Batlle. In effect Batlle became world famous in 2002 for his phrase describing the River Plate neighbours: “Argentines are a bunch of crooks, from the first to the last, from A to Z”.
The Paraguayan government called for “reflection and dialogue” from the Argentine government in order to find a solution to the commercial restrictions in place on imported products, “we don’t need any more walls”.